How to Win More Restaurant Clients

Here are two powerful strategies for helping your clients in the food hospitality industry. When you share these strategies with clients in this industry that you meet, you’ll impress them by demonstrating that you know their industry, and that you’re an expert. It will help you to win them as clients, and it could then lead onto doing some exciting, powerful consulting work at premium prices.

If you look at a menu in a restaurant, you might see the prices expressed like this:

This is actually a bad thing. Experts in the restaurant industry and menu engineers teach us that there are actually a couple of things going wrong here. The first is that the prices are right-aligned in a vertical column. The problem with this is, subconsciously it encourages us as a customer to look and compare prices. We become more price-sensitive and focus on the cheaper options.

Not only that, the second big mistake is those dotted lines, which we see all too often. What they do is they draw our attention to the price. So, if you ever do any work with a client who owns a café or a restaurant, ask to have a look at their menu. And if you see this, then you can explain to them the problem and a better way of doing it. And this is something you’ll have seen in more up-market restaurants:

Instead, rather than right-aligning, they line the price up with the ends of the descriptions of the food and they get rid of the dots. The research shows that this makes it much harder for the customer to compare prices and so they end up being less price-focused and more focused on the food itself. And so the average amount of money the customers spend goes up, which in turn of course increases profits.

#2 - Create an Anchor

The second idea that you can teach your clients in that industry is best illustrated by this example: If you’ve ever been to St. Pancras station in London you might have seen a champagne bar called Searcys. They have a number of them throughout the country, but this is the one that most people readily recognise. Now if you go to Searcys and you open up the menu, you’ll see that on their list of champagne are some very high-priced ones, one of which is £9,000. That is expensive! Surely, nobody in their right mind would buy champagne at £9,000.

Well, what we know from price psychology is that it doesn't actually matter whether anybody buys it or not. The purpose of the £9,000 bottle is not to sell it. Instead, it creates an anchor, and anchoring is the most powerful principle in price psychology. What happens when you use an anchor is, at the subconscious level, it changes our perception of all of the other prices. Compared to £9,000, the £100 bottle of wine doesn't seem quite so bad. As a result, we perceive the prices as lower, and so people spend more money.

So, there are just two ideas. On my Price Consulting programme, when I work with accountants and take them through a 12-month programme, I teach these techniques. And in particular, we look at specific trades and industries. To find out more about this powerful topic, and to help you start your price consulting journey, sign up for my free video course here.